Brief Guide to Writing Academic Arguments, A [Paperback]

A Brief Guide to Writing Academic Arguments prepares the reader to read and write the types of argument-related source-based writing they are most likely to encounter in college.

• A Brief Guide combines the best of several composition theoriesexpressive, cognitive, social, and rhetorical.  Expressivist pedagogies help students explore the generative nature of writing and the importance of establishing and maintaining their voices in academic writing.  Cognitive pedagogies teach writing as a problem-solving and problem-posing activity that can be analyzed and understood.  Social pedagogies encourage students to see how writers always write in a social context, and rhetorical pedagogies help students read and write persuasive texts that meet the unique demands of different contexts, audiences, and purposes.

• The highly-praised modified approach to Toulmin discusses the need for writers to explain how grounds support a claim instead of presenting warrants strictly as underlying assumptions that link grounds to a claim.

• Twenty professional and student essays and one sample annotated bibliography draw from disciplines across the curriculum help students understand the nature of academic arguments, how to analyze and evaluate arguments, how academic writers form, support, and explain claims, and how they use source material as evidence. 

• Extensive sets of qulS.